Should be able to reply to a comment which is in the maximal possible nest

Description

When comments reach the maximal nesting, it is confusing for users which got used to having the ability to "reply to" as to how can they reply to those comments.
My suggestion is to keep the "reply to", but instead of creating a new level, to just append the new comment after the latest comment at the same level.

That would completely undermine the meaning of the reply to link. The choice on allowing replies is up to the site owner. If they've state they don't want replies nested past a certain level, it would be completely irresponsible for us to make core 'override' that setting by still showing a reply link. People are smart enough to see that there is no reply link on one message but that there is one a level up, and just use that.

That would completely undermine the meaning of the reply to link. The choice on allowing replies is up to the site owner. If they've state they don't want replies nested past a certain level, it would be completely irresponsible for us to make core 'override' that setting by still showing a reply link. People are smart enough to see that there is no reply link on one message but that there is one a level up, and just use that.

Jane, after there are several comments at the maximal nest it becomes a PITA to find the original comment, and reply to it, and while all of us might understand what is going behind the scene and act in appropriate way, for the common commenter it is totally not obvious.
If the semantics should be different than a "reply to", thats ok, but it will be nice if this problem will get some kind of solution.

That would completely undermine the meaning of the reply to link. The choice on allowing replies is up to the site owner. If they've state they don't want replies nested past a certain level, it would be completely irresponsible for us to make core 'override' that setting by still showing a reply link. People are smart enough to see that there is no reply link on one message but that there is one a level up, and just use that.

It might be worth pointing out that aside from the "reply" link, this is current behavior. I mean if you reply to a comment too deep and manually change the submitted parent comment ID, it does what mark-k describes.

@mark-k: Yes, it can be a PITA, but it the blog owner's choice, not ours. We should not try to make core override the blog owner's choice. It's their site; WP is just the underlying platform.

Surely this is not overriding any functionality - overriding would be actually adding the extra depth. The Reply link becomes just a convenient way to add a reply to the parent comment. The blog owners are probably setting a max depth so they don't get really narrow comments, which doing the stated would not interfere with.

Ok, Since denis re-opened this without a reason, are we sticking to the current behaviour?

The only way i can see this "working" would be for it to open the reply dialogue below the current comment level where the comment would then show up.. Which sounds like it'll be even stranger to me.

The initial release of threaded comments did not handle threading past the maximum very well, infact, it didn't handle it at all (comments would overflow to the end of the comment list all together) - for example when the threading depth was changed from 5 to 3, Adding comments deeper than the maximum to the maximum depth level is a relatively recent fix

Sorry. My battery was nearly dead the day I had done so and I forgot to get back onto it.

It seems to me that there is no reason for the reply link to not appear. For all I know, WP could even continue to track the nesting level for other themes that might support a higher one, as long as we're not actually displaying the excess nesting level.

As things stand it's confusing on WP devel, for instance, when the threading becomes a bit deep and you end up needing to scroll up in order to catch a reply link -- from a comment one that won't even be the correct one, at that.

It feels unnatural for the reply link on a comment to cause the comment reply to appear elsewhere. I believe users are smart enough to use the parents reply link.

just 2 more cents:
This is not about being smart, but about not scrolling 3 pages up in order find the original comment, people who are not used to WP might not even notice/expect that there is a reply link in the original comment.

There's something I really don't get in this... Aren't we managing the whole tree as if it had unlimited nesting level at all times, and formatting it using something like nesting_level = min(nesting_level, max_nesting_level)? If so, I fail to see how any reply link is not added; and if not, then, duh... why aren't we?

If you're concerned about traceability of replies to original comments, why not add a link somewhere in the reply's box to link back to the originating comment. As an example, look at how Trac implements it's replies. The username of the person being replied to is a link back to their comment. I feel that as a user, I would be confused with a bunch of non-nested comments that are unclearly replying to something above it and as an admin I feel that allowing replies to comments at the max depth level completely negates to purpose of me setting the max depth in the first place.

I agree with Denis. Users are less confused by the lack of threading than by the lack of a reply link.

If the blog owner doesn't want another nested level, there shouldn't be another level of replies and if there is a reply link that doesn't actually reply to the comment its on. The inconsistent behavior could lead to more misunderstanding. The reply functionality should behave consistently so users aren't mislead or confused by the same link/function doing something different.

I'd just like to throw my 2¢ into the hat on this, as I also find it a very confusing user interface experience to have to hunt down a parent comment to reply to one of its children.

I'd really love to add a 'reply to this thread' link to the last child of a thread. The other children above it need not have anything, but there really should be a simpler/clearer way to continue the thread at its current level.

Suggestions on how to craft a php workaround?

A custom function that's called for each comment:
"Am I a parent or child comment?"
If parent: Display 'reply'
If child: "Am I at max depth?"
If at max depth: "Am I the last comment from this parent?"
If last comment: Display link 'continue this thread'
If not last comment: Display nothing
If not at max depth: "Am I the last comment from this parent?"
If last comment: Display two links - 'reply' and 'continue this thread'
If not last comment: Display 'reply'

Just thinking aloud here, but why not allow replies to all levels, and make the threaded depth selection control display only?

I mean, there's no reason to think that you can't reply to a comment at level X just because X+1 is greater than the max-depth setting. People are changing the depth not to disallow comments, but to control their width/display in the theme. I'd be perfectly happy allowing infinite depth as long as it didn't make my comments too narrow on the page.

So my vote = always show the reply link, then use that max-depth to control how deep the display goes. For comments below that depth, show them on the same level as their parent, in the most natural display mechanism. This avoids the need to reply to the parent, ever, and it displays the comments in the most natural way. Also, if the user changes the max-depth, then the threading is maintained properly even at the new depth.

For what it's worth, I gave a little test to a default install just to verify that type of functionality is already more or less active in there.
Comments that are nested several levels deep contract back to a restricted flow when the admin reduces the value for the number of threaded levels.

Perhaps the only solution for v2.7-present would be to set the depth at maximum (currently 10 levels) and use CSS to wrangle the comments into a single threaded view (for the preferred max depth). I believe this would allow for part Otto's suggested functionality to be used today -- although crippled when back & forth conversation reaches just a few replies.

The basic fact remains that "reply" has semantic meaning, and if it means one thing above level x and something different below level x, it's not consistent. If the issue is not wanting to scroll up a level to get a reply link, that's a theme display issue. The theme could just as easily add a link to comment on the thread in lieu of Reply. I'm voting wontfix -- again -- and would suggest someone do a plugin for this to prove that it's really necessary behavior in core before re-opening this ticket.